Terra Incognita
by andthenshesaid
Summary: Also known as the story of how Lily Luna Potter got drunk, fell in love, ran away, got very drunk, ran some more, and came home. Not necessarily in that order. LilyTeddy. For Tracie.


**terra incognita**

(dedicated to tracie – for being adorable.)  
**characters to JKR, title to the latin language, lyrics to MIKA, random bits to my weird head canon  
warnings for: underage drinking, messed up tenses, writing at 4AM and other such issues**

/

_she's walking around all over town  
needs somebody to notice, but the goodness gets her down  
she's happy to choose somebody to use  
good gone girl, she's got nothing to lose_

/

The day Lily Potter runs away the sky is white, like it's about to storm. A part of her wishes it would – because then it would just be some kind of fresh start.

Still.

It's nice not to be completely cliché.

/

Apparating feels too quick and too simple and it makes her dizzy anyway, plus she never got the hang of a broomstick like her brothers did, so instead she goes to the airport and bats her green-blue eyes at the boy behind the counter.

"First ticket to anywhere, please." She asks, and he smiles and points her in the right direction.

His eyes were the same shade of brown that Teddy's were when he wasn't screwing around with them. It made her want to stay and talk to him.

But she didn't.

/

Back in London, three hours after her disappearance, Scorpius Malfoy shows up and realizes that Lily Potter is not at home.

There's a note on the door, apparently left there by Teddy Lupin.

"Can't find you. Meet me at Gwen's."

The blonde shrugs and sticks it back on the door.

He'll call her later.

/

Her seat is in the middle and there's a screaming baby beside her and halfway through the flight she breaks down and uses a confundus charm to convince the attendant to lead her into first class.

The seat is still too stiff and the tiny bottles of alcohol aren't nearly as strong as firewhiskey.

She doesn't understand Roxy's fascination with all this muggle stuff.

/

Her ticket was to Venice.

Not as far as she wanted to go, but she actually speaks a bit of Italian – mostly thanks to one of her best friends' being half-Zabini and everything – and it's actually sunny there, so she decides to stay for a bit and not think.

In the Lily Potter Dictionary of Life, apparently, a bit means three hours and not think means "have every little thing remind you of home."

So, yeah.

She walks around, gets some gelato, accidentally interrupts about eleven different photo opportunities for about nine different tourists, wanders into a grocery store that has curtains instead of doors, runs away when she sees a girl with turquoise hair – because that was just too much, like, _really_– and buys some sea salt dark chocolate for Avery and a mask for Dominique and a glass rose for Scorpius, because if she eventually sees them again, it'd be nice to bring back presents.

She buys Teddy this jar of pasta sauce.

Then she throws it into the canal, because she's _definitely _not seeing him again.

/

Teddy Lupin, his hair turquoise and his eyes a mellow golden brown, waits at Gwen's for three hours.

Lily is never on time, and she's mad at him too –

But she's his pretty little 17-year old best friend and she can't just… Not talk to him anymore.

That's what she'd said – But… Well.

Maybe he didn't want to believe it.

Still, Lily has been stubborn as hell since she was born.

So he waits a little longer, signaling to the waitress for another cup of coffee.

Just a little longer.

/

Her plane ride to California is even worse. Because even if, this time, she just confounds the old lady at the ticket counter into giving her a first class ticket in the first place, it's about an eleven hour flight and she spends three at the airport waiting for it to arrive.

On the plus side, this month's edition of Elle came with a free shirt. So she bought three.

The guy next to her is some kind of pervy business man, and she can feel him staring down her shirt for the first 4 hours.

Then he falls asleep on her shoulder.

(She gives him a bat bogey hex when they get off and reminds herself _there has to be a better way to travel_.)

Also the food is shit, even for first class.

/

San Diego is a nice city.

She actually gets a hotel room there, at this Hotel del Coronado or something.

(And okay – it's after she rents the room, she realizes it's like on the top ten romantic getaways list or something, but she's okay with that.)

(_Really_.)

It has a beach view. And Lily _loves_ the beach.

So that's how she spends the first day. Eats breakfast like she's starving, even though it's some weird combination of dry cereal and cinnamon buns and coffee instead of tea, and throws on a bikini that she had stuffed into her duffel and –

She doesn't come out of the water until her fingers and toes are so wrinkly they resemble white raisins. And her hair is almost permanently stuck in some saltwater afro, but it doesn't even matter, because this is where she feels at home.

The next place, because being realistic, it's not like she's going to stay here _forever_, had better have a beach too.

The next day she actually heads into the city.

And that's where she does all the fun touristy stuff: going to China town and riding on those trolleys and interrupting even more photo ops for tourists and sneaking into bars and trying drinks with names like Sex on The Beach and Hot Pants.

She gets drunk and kisses a few boys. Boys with hair that stays the same color no matter what and don't change their noses into pig snouts to make her laugh.

Boys that don't make her skin tingle when they touch her.

Just boys.

(She goes to bed alone, if that helps her case.)

/

It takes everyone a while to notice Lily is actually _missing_. Maybe because she's always been a bit of a flake and known to throw herself into something for days on end, or maybe because no one was really looking that hard.

(And that sounds harsh, but it's sort of the truth.)

Only then Lily didn't show up for Sunday lunch. And her father and mother look at each other and realize she hasn't been by the house recently and Teddy says she stood him up for coffee and Scorpius, doesn't say anything, but the look of panic in his eyes shows one thing.

Lily Potter is officially missing.

This is where Roxanne Weasely mentions something about Lily asking her how to buy airplane tickets and Albus says she asked him about concealment charms and they call her boss and he says she quit and…

Well.

That's sort of where all hell breaks loose.

/

The third place she goes is Costa Rica.

It's still near a beach, and there's sun and surf and she gets sunburn, but it's the first time she's really and truly smiled in a while.

If she had to pick a place to live, it would be Costa Rica.

Lily actually stays there for four days, flaunting a skinny body in a multitude of bikini's and dark red hair and bright eyes.

Everyone eats it up and she learns the bartender's name is Thom and he grew up in South Carolina.

He's also gay and he has tan to die for and highlighted hair, and she thinks about maybe introducing him to Lou. Maybe Thom could get him out of the closet.

She's telling Thom about him, too. About a blonde cousin who he should totally meet and –

Then it strikes her that she might not be coming home anytime soon.

And what's worse –

That they might not even be looking for her.

She goes back to her hotel and throws all the presents she's been accumulating at a wall. Some of them break and some of the just flop sadly to the ground, but the glass rose she got for Scorpius makes a truly fantastic shattering noise.

She's out the window before the hotel can check in on all the noise.

/

They're looking for her, actually.

But she's cast every concealment charm in the book and they _just can't find her_.

It breaks them all apart really.

And eventually, after a month goes by and then another and then another and the paper's headlines shift less from _Harry Potter's Daughter Still Missing _to _Guess Which Quidditch Star Was Caught With Which Singer _and the only one still looking is Teddy Lupin.

Because even though Harry still has his best team of aurors on it – there's been a spike in neo-Death Eater activity and it's been _three months_ and he just can't do it anymore. And Ginny can scream about it all she likes, but she gave up a month ago.

Because James and Albus can swear they caught something of her in Venice and maybe Costa Rica – the concealment charms she cast are just _too good_.

So that leaves Teddy Lupin to be the hero.

Because maybe all he's got is a bracelet she left behind and a picture of a girl with red hair sitting at a bar in Costa Rica, but there's no way he can give up.

Not on Lily.

/

She remembered to cast spells before she went.

She's not completely stupid.

Still. There are little traces of course. You can't completely disappear – not if you're the daughter of England's hero.

Not that she doesn't try.

Still. Three months fly by –

Oslo and New York and Tokyo and Milan and Athens and Houston and crappy plane rides and interrupting even more tourists special moments and over a dozen different kinds of shitty coffee and fluorescent drinks and boys with all different hair colors that always stay that same color.

She ends up in Toronto eventually, sometime after Houston, or maybe Madrid… It's cold there, so she can't go swimming.

She doesn't like it so much.

But she keeps feeling so _hot_ like her entire body is burning from the inside out, and it continues burning through her heart, even when she takes freezing showers and practically drowns herself in a lake in Scotland.

She still feels like she's on fire.

And it's snowing in Toronto.

And that night she's sitting on the rooftop of her hotel, snow falling all around her, a forgotten paperback she'd picked up at the train station lying next to her, and she gets it.

This fire, burning through her and making her shake, killing her from the inside out…

It's homesickness.

It's because she misses the way her father would pick her up and spin her, even when she got too big for it or the way James used to stuff snow down her shirt whenever it snowed or the way Avery and Scorpius would jump onto her bed to wake her up on Christmas morning, or how, when she was little she would crawl into bed with Teddy…

She looks down off the edge of the rooftop.

If she looks hard enough, into the dizzying flurries and down onto the ground below, she sort of imagine she can see them, waiting for her. Or something silly like that.

And for that one instant, Lily gets the urge to jump.

If you jump – you have to fly, right? At least for a little bit.

It's the way it would go in some depressing film, she supposes. It would probably be in French. And after she jumped, and her red hair floated through the snow, there would be a shot of a clown letting go of a balloon or something.

And so, she's standing up, swaying back and forth on the very edge.

No one is there to save her.

But she's Lily Potter, and this entire trip was supposed to be about saving herself anyway.

Besides, she's always been scared of heights.

/

She passes out in her bed for 12 hours and leaves Canada 30 minutes after she wakes up.

/

Seattle is a nice city.

Rainy, but nice.

When she arrives, it's a downpour and she finds the closest bar with blinking neon lights and orders a shot.

Then she orders three more.

And three more after that, the feelings are all going numb and she's dancing and dancing and _forgetting_.

It's a good feeling.

And then, she's dancing with this boy.

This boy with turquoise hair and eyes that keep flashing grey and black and his hands all tight on her waist and she's a little too drunk and he's a little too – something.

And before she knows it, she's had another shot, and he is tugging her back to a hotel room.

Something about this seems familiar.

/

Teddy Lupin found a lead in Canada.

Some lady had been taking shots of a snowstorm – and in them is a girl with red hair, stumbling around near a hotel.

He figures that if it is her – and he's so sure it is, she would go somewhere rainy next.

That's how Lily operates. And then, he did a tracking spell and found her trace on a train, heading to Seattle next – just a little bit, before all the traces of shimmer are wiped away.

It's luck, pure chance, after that. He heads into a bar and he sees a girl he hasn't seen in maybe four months, a girl with flaming red hair and kaleidoscope blue-green eyes and his heart stops.

She's too far gone to even know what's going on, of course, and Teddy is maybe a little too overconfident, because Lily slipped up with that train and he feels like this is the end, except it's far from it.

He wakes up in a hotel room alone.

/

Lily wakes up next to Teddy mother fucking Lupin and proceeds to have a small panic attack.

This –

This is why the drinking age is 21 in the muggle world, because 18 year olds make shitty decisions. And apparently, so do 28 year olds, but that is probably not the point.

She ties her hair back and _runs_.

(Except not before giving the boy laying in the bed a quick kiss on the cheek. Maybe she missed him a little bit.)

It's not until she's safely in Berlin that she wonders what the hell he was doing in that bar, in Seattle, in America, and not married to Victoire in some perfect flat in London by now.

/

She doesn't stay in Berlin.

She coasts through a few German cities, not staying longer than a few hours in any of them, and when she's done with Germany, she hits Austria and Switzerland and the goal is just to keep moving, because if she's moving, she doesn't have to think.

/

He finds her again in Vienna.

She's sitting in a coffee shop, drinking tea and picking at a cranberry muffin.

Her grandmother makes it better, but now is not the time to dwell on that.

And she's sitting there, as innocently as a screwed up 18 year old can get, reading yet another paperback, this one some kind of sci-fi epic that someone had left at the train station, and he just plops himself down into the chair beside her.

"You left me in a hotel room, Lils."

Here is where she should have gotten up and left. Apparated. Gone somewhere he could _never_ find her. Like the bottom of an ocean. In a submarine.

That would have been smart.

Instead she glared.

"You just can't leave me alone, can you?"

"I mean. I _am _your best friend."

"You are not. If you were my best friend you would be leaving me alone right now, like Scorp and Av are doing."

"Scorpius is busy trying to get your cousin to marry him. And I'm pretty sure Zabini is sleeping with your brother again."

Lily rolls her eyes.

"Plus, if you stay away any longer, you're going to miss Lucy and Lorcan's wedding. And I think Hugo and Velma started dating –"

"Hugo is not dating that _thing_."

"Ouch. You know, she's not that bad, once you get past the complete and utter bitch part. She at least, doesn't run away from home without telling her best friend."

Lily almost responds with "That is because she has no friends." But she doesn't.

Instead she stays quiet.

"Oh. Sorry. Was that too soon?"

She's still quiet.

"Your dads still looking you know. He has his best team of aurors on it. It's as bad as when Uncle Ron went missing – you remember that?"

She begins shredding the sugar packets that someone left on the table.

"And your mom was crying. Hell. Half of the people in the family were crying. I cried. If that matters."

She finishes with the sugar and starts on the fake sugar.

She hates fakes sugar. It gives her some kind of odd pleasure to tear it up.

"I missed you too. I mean. I figured that was kind of obvious, since I've been searching for you for the past like 5 months."

She rips on especially hard and fake sugar flies over the entire table.

Oops.

Lily wonders if Teddy remembers the last conversation they had before she left.. The one about Victoire and feelings.

She's sort of hoping he doesn't.

"You aren't going to talk to me, are you?"

Really hoping he doesn't.

Not like it was the _reason_she ran away or anything. There were lots of reasons that she ran away. Really, you could even go as far as saying it had nothing to do with the perfect fucking love story that was Teddy and Victoire at all.

Yeah. A person could totally say that.

(They might have to be compulsive liars, though.)

"Is this about me and Victoire?"

_Damnit. _

She begins mixing the fake sugar and the real sugar and all the paper shreds into one big pile.

Then she draws a sad face.

He, for some reason, takes that as encouragement.

"I broke up with her… If that matters."

It doesn't, it doesn't, _itdoesn'tdoesn'tdoesn't_.

"It – It doesn't."

And that's when she walks out.

/

Teddy stays in the café, hair turning black and eyes darker than coffee.

He misses her.

/

A week later, Lily Potter is in Cabo San Lucas, a very pretty beach somewhere in Mexico, trying to forget.

(Again.)

But she really does love the beach, and she's not going to let stupid not best friends ruin it for her.

So instead she buries her toes in the sand and gets lost beneath the waves.

She hasn't slept since she last saw Teddy.

Not really anyway. If you don't count passing out for a few hours on the plane ride over or in the sand for about 30 minutes a day.

There are very deep bags under her eyes and her nails are bitten to the quick. A very stupid habit she never should have picked up from Rosie.

It scares her that she's barely even surprised when someone hands her a drink and when she looks up, that someone is all ginger-hair-warm-brown-eyes-Teddy-smile.

"I think I've made it clear that I don't want you stalking me."

"Have I made it clear that I love you?"

She freezes up.

He means it in a best friend/pseudo cousin kind of way. The way he loves her dad. The way he loves his owl.

Maybe a bit more than his owl, actually. He always forgets to change Janet's cage.

"Like, in love with you Lils. I mean. Let's get married and have kids and be old together. Ya know?"

She sucks in the air around her, so hard it hurts.

"No. No I don't."

/

Maybe a part of her does though, because the next thing she knows, the air is swirling around her and when she's done apparating, without even looking around, she kneels down on the ground and throws up everything she's eaten in the past week.

/

Teddy was actually pretty sure that was going to work.

He should also probably stop taking romantic advice from all those Romcoms that Victoire made him watch.

In, _those_, stupid lines always worked though, and Lily probably would have been sharing his apartment by now and they'd be having some kind of awkward conversation with Uncle Harry about how they were in love.

He sighs.

His hair turns the color of her eyes.

The tan college girls sitting on the beach next to him give him weird looks.

He's kind of used to it.

Still, it gives him the encouragement to actually get up and find the love of his life.

Even thinking that made some sort of stupid grin spring up on his face.

/

When she's done with her disgusting barf session, she looks around.

She's on that beach in Scotland.

She uses to love coming here. When she was 7 and Teddy got his apparation license this was the first place they'd gone. And she'd gotten to go swimming, even though it was too cold, and Teddy had gone with her and they'd stayed for the entire day, because he'd been smart enough to pack a picnic.

Her brain was intensely stupid for bringing her here.

Still, it was a beach and she was too tired to do anything but lie on the sand with her hands in the water.

/

It's not like she loves him back.

That was the whole reason she ran away, so she _wouldn't_ love him back and he could be happy with Vic. That's what best friends and good cousins do.

And she'd been sucking at that her whole life – with the whole getting into Slytherin and stepping on Vic's foot in all those family pictures and not talking to him once he started dating Vic – so, starting now had seemed like _such_ a good idea.

Lily sighed.

Life changing decisions had seemed so _eas_y to make 6 months ago.

/

She falls asleep while she's still thinking.

And when she wakes up, he is staring at her.

And right now his eyes are brown and his hair is blue-green and he's not smiling.

"So. I love you."

She's quiet.

"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. And not in that stupid cousin way that I know you think I mean. I broke up with Vic – for _you_. It's what I was trying to tell you at Gwen's like 6 months ago. I want to be with _you_. I mean, if your dad and brothers wouldn't kill me, I'd probably propose to you right now."

She's quiet.

"_Lils_. Do you get it?"

And then there are these stupid tears welling up in her eyes that definitely aren't supposed to be there.

"Okay, look. Stupid. I get it. You love me. But – I mean. Maybe I don't love you _back_."

He jerks back, like she electrocuted him.

She feels bad, because that was just a blatant lie.

"What?"

His voice sounds so broken and crushed and awful.

Her heart is breaking, but she stands strong.

"Yeah. Okay. Maybe this whole trip was me getting over you. Maybe I don't want to be with someone who was in love with my cousin for half my life."

And, _oh god_, his eyes are this ice-cutting sharp blue and his hair is the same color as Scorp's.

And then he just turns away and before she can blink, he's gone.

She's back on the ground, throwing up bile and water, her throat burning.

The water on her face is from the salt spray.

/

Teddy Lupin goes back to his flat.

He's pretty sure this is what it feels like when your entire world crumbles around your feet.

So, he does what guys do when the world crumbles around their feet and downs an entire 6 pack of beer in a half hour.

And then a bottle of firewhiskey.

And then he passes out and doesn't dream of red hair and blue-green eyes. Or if he does, he doesn't remember.

So, naturally when he wakes up it's the only thing he sees.

"You smell awful."

He blinks.

He's not really sure if he's still drunk or not.

"And I think your liver is done for."

"Am I dreaming?"

"No."

"Oh."

"So. Back there. At the beach. I might have been lying."

He blinks.

"About the whole love thing."

Her eyes are very pretty. It's like looking at the ocean.

"And. I mean, what I'm saying here is that… I'm actually in love with you. You know. That whole proposal-live-together-as-old-people-pink-hearts kind of love that you were talking about before. And I'm just going to keep talking, because I don't think you're listening to me anymore, but I guess some kind of confirmation would be nice, or something."

"I love you too."

"Well. Yeah. I know. You said it first."

/

She's not really sure who kissed who first, but before she knows it, her lips are on his and his hands are in her hair and her legs are wrapping around his waist and –

He stops.

She could kick him, really.

"You are coming home now, right?"

And so, instead of kicking him, she leans in slowly and kisses him again.

"Yeah, Teddy. I'm coming home."

/

The sky outside is a blindingly bright blue.

/

**reviews would be really great, please&thankyou. But don't favorite without reviewing because it isn't nice. **


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